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Friday, 12 September 2008

Are you and academic and thinking of buying a Xilinx development kit?

Then I can't plug Digilent enough. They have two very large FPGA boards available for very keen prices. The first is the Xilinx XUP, which is a XC2VP30 Virtex 2 Pro with 2 405PPC cores. This board supports DDR and is a great way to get started with prototyping Gaisler SoC designs. The excellent academic price is only $299! One word of warning: this board doesn't have true SATA ports depite there being connectors and labels saying SATA. They are high speed digital data links that are SATA like but are SATA non-standard and cannot connect to a SATA HDD. No out of band signals.

The second is an uprated ML505. This is identical to the standard Xilinx ML505, but it has a much larger FPGA on it (XC5VLX110T) and comes with a JTAG programmer. The ML505 from Xilinx doesn't. Total price $750.

I have hunted about and the prices here end up hundreds of pounds less than full commercial prices. In the case of the ML505 it is about £300.

Consultancy

I am happy to discuss any of the topics or tools listed here for free, however if you want something done that will take a long time then I would be pleased to do some consultancy for you. Email me on matthew@swabey.org. If you are curious about my background and experience feel free to check my CV.

About Me

Boring but Important:

The views expressed on this website are my own and do not represent either the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering or the University of Purdue.

All items posted are done so in good faith in the hopes of being useful to people using the tools or technologies legally. If you feel any information here is objectionable or reveals important information please contact me to discuss having it modified or removed.